Jan White was
not just a magazine designer. He was a passionate evangelist for good
design. An underlying message in his commentaries was to encourage us
all to make design and text function supportively together.

I met
Jan many years ago when he was an impassioned luncheon speaker at a
Society of National Association Publications event. I bought his now
classic book, Editing by Design. But quickly I found that it was
hard to keep it on my office bookshelf. Staff members kept swiping it.
The stealth borrowers were from both the editorial and design
departments. So when I went to look for the missing book, I never knew
where to start looking. Ultimately, the solution I found was to buy my
own copy and to keep it at home!

Since 2009, Jan White has been a
frequent contributor to Editors Only. As a tribute to his work,
we now present a somewhat random collection of his sage advice:

--"All the
techniques of geometrical alignments and spacings make sense by
clarifying the elements. Why is that useful? Because people like short
bits and resent big ones."

--"First-glance curiosity is
vital, because your effort is wasted unless potential readers are
interested. So we must use visual salesmanship to play up elements, make
them noticeable, and thus user-friendly."

--"Publication-making
is a creative cultural boon. It is about doing things that are worth
doing for their own sake -- all to increase the sum of human knowledge
and understanding. Making flowers bloom."

--"Excellence of
content is identical whether it is on slow, boring paper, or in flashy
digitized format. The intellectual process we call 'thinking' that works
so well on paper is absolutely appropriate when it is converted into
electronic formats. It is all the same process."

--"Is our
'dying' profession dying? I submit that it is more alive than ever,
because it is as valid and vibrant as ever, because what we do continues
to be as useful and important as ever. It is needed."

--"We
have the same problem as a fine restaurant, where you don't just expect
fresh ingredients deliciously spiced, but they must also be artfully
presented on the plate. Presentation isn't a cosmetic luxury, but an
integral ingredient of a good dish or a good magazine. However, it can
never be more than a supportive ingredient."

--"We have to
understand the complexity of the communication process, and simplify the
message to make it easy to absorb. Our readers are normally searching
only for limited information at any one time."

--"Once you
know the point of the message, you can start searching for its cogent
image. Forget being 'creative.' You are not looking for a florid visual
with which to make a splash -- there are too many meaningless visual
splashes all around as it is, and who is swayed by such efflorescence?
Instead, you are searching for something that will make the point of the
message startling, understandable, memorable, persuasive."

--"Is
white space wasted space? Not if we make it work for its living. We must
use it as a tool to improve the capacity of the visible page to tell our
story both clearer and faster. Used to practical purpose, we don't need
to invest vast swaths of emptiness for dramatic contrast. Forget
conspicuous consumption. We can hardly afford the luxury of 'a place for
the eye to rest.' Probably never will again. Instead, concentrate on
servicing the readers. Use deliberately controlled bits of white space
as raw material to lead them to what matters and expose the information
in clear, fast, and bite-size chunks."

--"One of the myths
of publishing is that 'readers' are readers. They start out as viewers.
Searchers who flip, scan, hunt and peck, looking for the nuggets they
want. In a hurry, saturated with 'information,' and perhaps a bit lazy,
they need to be lured into reading. 'Persuaded' might be a better word,
because luring implies bamboozling, and duplicity has no place in
publishing. The least trace of trickery is self-defeating, because it
destroys the potential reader's trust. Persuasion that is credible
exposes the valuable content. Making value accessible makes the
publication useful and liked. Combining accessibility (i.e., making
things easy to find) with speed (i.e., at first glance) makes the
publication a useful, dependable tool."

--"Editors honestly
have no idea that such a thing as flow even exists. I know whereof I
speak, because I've worked with literally thousands of editors in all
these too-many years of consulting. Ostensibly, my specialty was
designing multipage products (mostly magazines), but that was just
labeling to merchandise my living. The real subject was not publication designing
but publication making, because it is impossible to separate the
intellectual content from its presentation if you hope to make those
publications better. What it says and how it says -- content and form --
must work together because they are the sides of the same coin. No,
wrong! They are an amalgam of the metals and appear identical in both
sides of that same cliché coin."

--"Don't think of
pages as static, standalone units. Instead, see your multipage medium
the way readers do when they flip pages. Each fresh impression is a link
in a chain, and the entire chain is the publication. Back to front,
front to back."

--"Good design expresses, reflects, and
exposes inner meaning. Helping inner meaning jump off the page is the
true value of 'design.' It transmits writers' words, their inherent
ideas, and their significance to the reader vividly, strikingly,
memorably. If it looks startling and trendy but is essentially
meaningless, it is nothing more than phony window-dressing."

--"I've
spent half a lifetime deconstructing magazine design to make it less
artistic and more functional, cogently based on sensible analysis rather
than on personal taste (though that remains a component, of course)."

And
we close with Jan's own description of what his work has been about, and
which now serves as his own self-authored epitaph: "He [tried]
to persuade word people to think visually and visual people to think
verbally."